Walter Lippmann > Quotes

“Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”
― Walter Lippmann

“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.”
― Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the news

“It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.”
― Walter Lippmann

“For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society. They are an ordered more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world, people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We are members.

[...]

It is not merely a short cut. It is all these things and something more. It is the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our own sense or our own value, our own position, and our own rights. [...] They are the fortress of our traditions, and behind its defenses we can continue to feel ourselves safe in the position we occupy.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“Ignore what a man desires and you ignore the very source of his power.”
― Walter Lippmann

“There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride. They have yielded to the perennial temptation.”
― Walter Lippmann

“When all think alike, then no one is thinking.”
― Walter Lippmann

“To create a minimum standard of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary duty of the democratic state.”
― Walter Lippmann

“Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character. We extend this into all our thinking. Between us and the realities of social life we build up a mass of generalizations, abstract ideas, ancient glories, and personal wishes. They simplify and soften experience. It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves. We worry about their fate and forget their original content.”
― Walter Lippmann, Preface To Politics

“What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.”
― Walter Lippman

“there are at least two distinct selves, the public and regal self, the private and human.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“Chief Factors Limiting Access to Facts:
1)Artificial censorship
2)Limitations of social contact
3)Comparatively meager time in a day for paying attention to public affairs.
4)Distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages
5)Difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world
6)Fear of facing those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of men's lives”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“If we cannot fully understand the acts of other people, until we know what they think they know, then in order to do justice we have to appraise not only the information which has been at their disposal, but the minds though which they have filtered it.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“Though it is disguised by the illusion that a bureaucracy accountable to a majority of voters, and susceptible to the pressure of organized minorities, is not exercising compulsion, it is evident that the more varied and comprehensive the regulation becomes, the more the state becomes a despotic power as against the individual. For the fragment of control over the government which he exercises through his vote is in no effective sense proportionate to the authority exercised over him by the government.”
― Walter Lippmann, The Good Society

“All men desire their own perfect adjustment, but they desire it, being finite men, on their own terms.”
― Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public

“Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence. But in that helter-skelter which we flatter by the name of civilization, the citizen performs the perilous business of government under the worst possible conditions. A faint recognition of this truth inspires the movement for a shorter work day, for longer vacations, for light, air, order, sunlight and dignity in factories and offices. But if the intellectual quality of our life is to be improved that is only the merest beginning. So long as so many jobs are an endless and, for the worker, an aimless routine, a kind of automatism using one set of muscles in one monotonous pattern, his whole life will tend towards an automatism using one set of muscles in one monotonous pattern, his whole life will tend towards an automatism in which nothing is particularly to be distinguished from anything else unless it is announced with a thunderclap. So long as he is physically imprisoned in crowds by day and even by night his attention will flicker and relax.
It will not hold fast and define clearly where he is the victim of all sorts of pother, in a home which needs to be ventilated of its welter of drudgery, shrieking children, raucous assertions, indigestible food, bad air, and suffocating ornament.
Occasionally perhaps we enter a building which is composed and spacious; we go to a theatre where modern stagecraft has cut away distraction, or go to sea, or into a quiet place, and we remember how cluttered, how capricious, how superfluous and clamorous is the ordinary urban life of our time. We learn to understand why our addled minds seize so little with precision, why they are caught up and tossed about in a kind of tarantella by headlines and catch-words, why so often they cannot tell things apart or discern identity in apparent differences.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. . . . as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power. . . . Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“We are concerned in public affairs, but immersed in our private ones.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“It is often very illuminating...to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“Since position and contact play so big a part in determining what can be seen, heard, read, and experienced, as well as what it is permissible to see, hear, read, and know, it is no wonder that moral judgment is so much more common than constructive thought.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“...the Bill of Rights does not come from the people and is not subject to change by majorities. It comes from the nature of things. It declares the inalienable rights of man not only against all government but also against the people collectively.”
― Walter Lippmann

“These various remedies, eugenic, educational, ethical, populist and socialist, all assume that either the voters are inherently competent to direct the course of affairs or that they are making progress towards such an ideal. I think [democracy] is a false ideal.”
― Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public

“For language is by no means a perfect vehicle of meanings. Words, like currency, are turned over and over again, to evoke one set of images to-day, another to-morrow. There is no certainty whatever that the same word will call out exactly the same idea in the reader's mind as it did in the reporter's.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“Almost no two experiences are exactly alike, not even of two children in the same household. The older son never does have the experience of being the younger. And therefore, until we are able to discount the difference in nurture, we must withhold judgment about differences of nature. As well as judge the productivity of two soils by comparing their yield before you know which is in Labrador and which in Iowa, whether they have been cultivated and enriched, exhausted, or allowed to run wild.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion